Don’t you love that little “Add to calendar” button? You just click it from an event announcement or invite, and it automatically puts the event information on your calendar. No cutting and pasting needed.

Redwood City, California-based Stanza, formerly known as SpotOn.it, is taking the add-to-calendar button to the next level.

The startup’s Add-To-Calendar button can integrate with any calendar client (Google, iCal, Outlook, Exchange, etc.). But it does some tricks that older, static calendar buttons can’t do.

Stanza’s button can:

Connect information to a calendar event, like score updates after a sporting game, or recipes after a cooking class

Connect services to a calendar event that allow users to do things like buy tickets, or upgrade their seats once at the event, or order an Uber to the event

Automatically show the right information to each calendar end-user, based on the users’ time and location context

Return engagement and analytics data back to the publisher

According to the company, more than 300 sports teams (from the NFL, NBA, NHL, and NCAA) already have adopted the button. The button has already been used to sync more than 56 million sporting events to users’ personal calendars, Stanza says.

Stanza has just closed a $4.3 million seed funding round, with participation from Metamorphic Ventures, Founder Collective, Tekton Ventures, Western Technology Investment, and Stanford-StartX Fund, along with a group of angel investors. Stanza says it will use the money to expand its customer base beyond sports teams.

Stanza is available for a limited preorder from now until late summer 2015, at a price of $7 per month for the first year. After the limited preorder, the price goes up to $15 per month.

Stanza was founded by CEO Smita Saxena in 2012.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/09/stanza-formerly-spoton-it-pulls-in-4-3m-for-smart-add-to-calendar-button/feed/01693438Stanza (formerly SpotOn.it) pulls in $4.3M for smart Add-to-Calendar buttonHey, procrastinators: Timeful's new iOS app will help you manage your timehttp://venturebeat.com/2014/07/31/hey-procrastinators-timefuls-new-ios-app-will-help-you-manage-your-time/
http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/31/hey-procrastinators-timefuls-new-ios-app-will-help-you-manage-your-time/#respondThu, 31 Jul 2014 13:04:22 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=1517364I’ll be the first to admit that managing the hours of my day is something I’ve yet to get a handle on. Fortunately, I’m not the only one facing this challenge, and a startup called Timeful is releasing a new app today that should help, dubbed “Timeful.” Now, you’re probably thinking it’s just another “calendar app” that will […]
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I’ll be the first to admit that managing the hours of my day is something I’ve yet to get a handle on.

Fortunately, I’m not the only one facing this challenge, and a startup called Timeful is releasing a new app today that should help, dubbed “Timeful.”

Now, you’re probably thinking it’s just another “calendar app” that will “tell” you (read: push notifications) when your appointments are coming up and offer some helpful gimmicks around travel directions (similar to services like Sunrise, Tempo, Mynd, etc.), but it’s not. Timeful aims to help you fill out the empty spaces of your schedule with the tasks you’re most likely to forget or put off, like paying a bill or picking up groceries. And it gets better at its job the more you teach it your scheduling habits by accepting or rejecting its suggestions.

“The one place where we haven’t put algorithms and machine learning is time,” Timeful co-founder Yoav Shoham told VentureBeat.

The founding team, composed of machine learning and artificial intelligence experts, is putting those fields to work to help people find the time to do the things they procrastinate on, normally because they’re not fixed in time the way business meetings or dentist appointments are.

“The simple observation is that what doesn’t make it onto your schedule tends to not get done. The first goal is to have one place where all those things can make themselves known to you,” said Shoham.

Within the app, items are split into three categories: events, to-dos, and habits. Events are scheduled items such as appointments and meetings, to-dos are tasks to be done such as paying a bill or mailing a gift, and habits are ongoing behaviors such as going for a run.

The app pulls from the various calendars in your phone, especially the default Apple calendar, and pushes back scheduled items so everything is in sync, it serves up to-do and habit reminders from within the Timeful app. Event reminders come from the Apple calendar app, as those items are usually scheduled in your permanent personal or work calendar. Timeful uses the EventKit framework to accomplish this, said co-founder Jacob Bank.

The company has been testing the app with a small group of users, though it had no significant trends or results to share at this time.

Timeful is first launching on iPhone today, and the team says the app will come to other operating systems soon. It wouldn’t disclose any details of its future product plans, however.

In May, the company announced it had raised $6.8 million in funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Data Collective, Pitango, Ashton Kutcher’s A-Grade Investments, and others. In April, Khosla Ventures partner Keith Rabois said he had backed the company and later announced he was joining the board of directors.

Timeful was founded in 2013 by Bank, Shoham, and Dan Ariely and is based in Mountain View, Calif.

The Sunrise Calendar app is now available for use on your Mac. It was originally designed for Google Calendar, but it has branched out to many platforms including iPhone, iPad, Android, Exchange, and iCloud.

Sunrise Calendar takes a rather traditional approach in terms of calendar layout, offering a day, week, and month view. It also has weather, Google Maps, and time-zone support integrated. But where this app really shines is through its third-party integrations. You can sync your Sunrise account with a variety of other productivity and lifestyle services to ensure you never miss an important event or date again.

The app works with Evernote, LinkedIn, TripIt, Songkick, Asana, Producteev, and Github, with more partnerships on the horizon. The idea here is to import any meetings, concert dates, due dates, and other events you want to keep tabs on into your calendar in context. The ultimate goal of the Sunrise Calendar is to boost productivity by limiting the need for cross-checking between apps.

Sunrise Atelier, Inc. specializes in calendar apps and email services and is based in New York City. It was incorporated in 2012 and is under the direction of company president Pierre Valade.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2014/07/03/sunrises-move-to-mac-reflects-its-calendar-app-dominance/feed/01501865Sunrise's move to Mac reflects its calendar-app dominanceMynd Calendar for iOS adds a simple solution for juggling scheduleshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/12/11/mynd-calendar-scheduler-update/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/11/mynd-calendar-scheduler-update/#respondWed, 11 Dec 2013 17:00:54 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=870990Alminder’s Mynd Calendar app for iOS is designed to serve as a sort of hub for your day, listing just about everything you could possibly need to get things done in concise, easy-to-read boxes. In a new update now available on the iOS app store, the calendar learns a fairly clever way of tackling an […]
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Alminder’s Mynd Calendar app for iOS is designed to serve as a sort of hub for your day, listing just about everything you could possibly need to get things done in concise, easy-to-read boxes. In a new update now available on the iOS app store, the calendar learns a fairly clever way of tackling an old, fairly common task: scheduling appointments.

Any calendar app worth its salt can handle something as simple as creating events and sharing said event’s details with attendees. The new Mynd Scheduler attempts to streamline the process. It’s a fairly simple update but offers that quintessential “well, duh” moment of clarity that makes me a bit annoyed that the rest of the calendars I’ve dabbled with over the years haven’t quite figured this all out.

Above: Mynd blocks out proposed event times in your calendar — no more overbooking!

The Mynd Scheduler is incredibly easy to use: Create a title for your event, pick some times, and set a duration, then invite some contacts. Every time slot you select will be blocked out as a proposed event on your calendar, so you’ll have a visual cue of your potential schedule. The app then automatically generates an email with all of the proposed meetings times in a neat, bulleted list, and sends it along to attendees. When you’re ready to set a time, just pick one in the app and the dummy events will be cleared.

This is a bit of a double-edged sword. If you’ve used Google or Microsoft’s Outlook to schedule events, you’re probably used to getting those emails with handy “Yes, No, Maybe” links that’ll automatically add events to your calendar. The email that Mynd sends, by contrast, isn’t “interactive” in the same way; attendees will need to read the (brief) message and reply, an extra layer of complexity that likely saves much confusion in the long run, but nevertheless goes against the grain.

On the other hand, setting the meeting planner as the final arbiter of meeting times keeps inboxes nice and tidy: tally the responses, pick a time that’s left and presto, your meeting is set. If you’ve ever accidently booked several meetings in the same time slot — I’m looking at you, CES — this new update easily prove rather attractive.

There’s far more to Mynd than this retooled scheduler, and if you aren’t satisfied with the default iOS calendar, then it’s worth checking out. Access to your calendars is required, but things really start to shine when you give the app permission to link with a myriad of other services, including iOS’ Reminders, Evernote, and LinkedIn. The app can also offer up commute times to and from events when given enough information, which all adds up to a rather useful package.

Better still, Mynd is free — if you own an iPhone and do things over the course of the day, there’s no real harm in checking it out.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/12/11/mynd-calendar-scheduler-update/feed/0870990Mynd Calendar for iOS adds a simple solution for juggling schedulesUpTo 2.0 re-reinvents the calendar — this time targeting Google, Outlook, and Applehttp://venturebeat.com/2013/07/11/upto-2-0-re-reinvents-the-calendar-this-time-google-outlook-and-apple-are-in-the-crosshairs/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/07/11/upto-2-0-re-reinvents-the-calendar-this-time-google-outlook-and-apple-are-in-the-crosshairs/#respondThu, 11 Jul 2013 14:01:42 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=777903A year ago UpTo was going to be the social network that lives in your calendar. Today, with 250,000 downloads, a million events, and a $2M series A round under his belt, CEO Greg Schwartz realizes that a modernized calendar is a big enough vision on its own, thank you very much.
]]>A year ago, UpTo was going to be the social network that lives in your calendar. Today, with 250,000 downloads, a million events, and a $2M series A round under his belt, the company realizes that a modernized calendar is a big enough vision on its own, thank you very much.

It’s called a pivot, and nearly every successful startup goes through one.

“Instagram started as a location app with support for photos and pivoted to a photo app with support for location,” CEO Greg Schwartz says.”We’re pivoting from social first to calendar first.”

Today, UpTo is launching version 2.0 of its popular — and Apple-featured app. The new release includes what Schwartz calls “the most significant change” the young company has ever made.

The core of UpTo 1.0 showed your friends, family, and coworkers’ schedules as well as your own, which has obvious social implications. But by putting social first, Schwartz says, the app was harder to use as an actual calendar. So, based on what UpTo is seeing users do in the app, calendaring is coming to the forefront.

It’s still social in the sense that UpTo gathers all the events for you and the people you care about, but UpTo 2.0 highlights your personal calendar, plus adds typical calendar features such as built-in meeting invites. It also extends the traditional calendar with innovative little features such as enabling a single tap on teleconference events to initiate the call and built-in driving directions to remote meetings.

That’s a welcome pivot — I used UpTo myself for about a month when it first came out, attempting to sync my life with my wife’s and our family’s, but I found that using UpTo as my go-to calendar was difficult. This should make it easier.

But with a pivot like this, UpTo is now competing head-to-head with all the big boys of calendaring: Google Calendar, Outlook, Apple’s iCal and Calendar app on iPhone, and more.

And that’s a challenging proposition.

To make its app attractive to users, UpTo 2.0 starts with syncing — all your Google Calendar items, Outlook, or Apple calendar items just show up in the app — just as they did in version 1.0. And then the idea is that UpTo will layer in all the pieces of your life that never seem to show up in your calendar, such as events from important people in your life, not just your work, and the most valued activities in your leisure life.

How is that different from any other calendar?

“Everything we’re seeing out there is a utility around appointments,” Schwartz explains. “When I look at UpTo I see those meetings, but I also see that my wife is taking my daughter to ballet class, when my favorite TV show is, when my favorite sports teams are playing … our vision is that when you look at your calendar, you think I can’t believe how much I was missing.”

The sports teams and TV shows come in through event feeds, which UpTo has about 5,000 of, from major-league teams, entertainment calendars, civic or state calendars, and more. Subscribe to them, and you’re seeing your favorite leisure events show up in your calendar as options to consider. And, of course, the family and friends events are from other UpTo users who have chosen to share those events with you.

Which all sounds good, but there’s still the challenging matter of user-acquisition.

Which is why a second part of UpTo’s pivot is a new software-as-service solution for sports teams, governments, and brands around, of course, calendaring. It’s no secret that most websites’ static calendars suck, and UpTo plans to make them interactive, living calendars, as well as adding the ability for fans and customers to check into events, Facebook style.

Which means those fans and customers get exposed to UpTo’s calendaring solutions right on the web.

Early adopters of the solution include the Cleveland Cavaliers, TicketMaster, and the state of Michigan, where UpTo is based. An NFL team is also slated to join shortly, but I can’t mention the name publicly yet.

The lure for brands and teams? Fans who check into the calendar app can be entered into customer relationship management apps — and communicated with the way most teams only talk to season ticket holders and most companies only talk to their best clients, currently.

“It’s a bit of a different product,” Schwartz admits. “But if someone checks into their event, they’re authenticating with UpTo. And then we can market to those users, providing lead-gen opportunities while also monetizing as a SaaS app.”

All this development, of course, takes money.

UpTo recently completed a $2 million series A led by Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures, with a late $500,000 coming in from Wisconsin-based Venture Investors.

There’s a lesson in that $500,000: sometimes money takes a long time to arrive. Venture Investors first saw UpTo on its demo day over a year ago, and after multiple communications, decided to join the A round.

The company will use the money to hire “a couple key execs in sales and marketing,” Schwartz told me. “Plus, we’re adding some developers for our consumer product, investing in our marketing platform, and scaling out our platform.”

Any.DO is making time management seamless with Cal, a simple and sophisticated calendar application.

With the addition of Cal for iPhone, Any.DO’s suite of connected life management applications promises to streamline your tasks, email, notes, and calendar in a stylish and connected way.

Any.DO is currently the most popular to-do application for iPhone and Android and millions of people use the simple task manager. The company recently raised $3.5 million to build life management applications that enable productivity through play and control through habits. Cal is currently in beta and will be released later this summer.

“If you connect Cal with Any.DO, you’ll be able to see your tasks in your calendar, you can initiate the Any.DO moment from Cal if you have too many things planned for the day,” said Omer Perchik, founder and CEO. “Soon we’ll reveal more and more integrations.”

Cal will integrate simply with the to-do list application to automatically manage your to-do list and eliminate the need to plan for the same thing twice.

You can send messages and plan events right from the application through contact, location, and social integration. The sleek design gives you a clear breakdown on what’s next and what you’ve accomplished.

“Cal knows where you are in your day and automatically adapts to it by showing you the right information for what’s coming next,” Perchik said.

Cal will only be available for iPhone, but an Android version is in the works. Those interested can sign up for a notification for when it’s available.

San Francisco-based Any.DO was founded in 2010 to simplify the way people manage their tasks, and give them time to have more fun. Over five million users have checked off their to-do lists on Any.DO, and the addition of Cal will make task and calendar management even easier.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/06/any-do-launches-cal-to-simplify-calendar-and-task-management/feed/0751720Any.DO to launch Cal to simplify calendar and task managementSunrise raises $2.2M to make waking up for work suck lesshttp://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/sunrise-raises-2-2m-to-make-waking-up-for-work-suck-less/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/sunrise-raises-2-2m-to-make-waking-up-for-work-suck-less/#respondTue, 04 Jun 2013 16:16:12 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=750644Two ex-Foursquare designers secure a first round of funding for their 'smart' and 'beautiful' calendar app that focuses on user experience.
]]>Getting out of bed in the morning can be painful and Sunrise is trying to improve that experience with good design. Today the startup that delivers a ‘smart’ and beautiful’ digest of your day announced closing a $2.2 million round of funding.

The founders of Sunrise are ex-Foursquare designers Jeremy Le Van and Pierre Valade. They were disappointed with the available calendar options and decided to create a better designed alternative that focuses on user experience. The platform connects APIs from sources where you might have events saved, such as Facebook, Google Calendar, and Eventbrite, and assembles all of that information into one digestible email.

“Calendars is one space that hasn’t really evolved in the past years, and it’s time to connect all the information together in a smart way,” Valade said. “When users wake up, it’s already their routine to check their emails, so we are in the natural flow they’re used to. It is both simple and powerful. We designed at least 25 different variations before finding the right one that will work both on mobile and desktop. I think we’ve designed the best email ever.”

Sunrise goes beyond scheduling and also pulls in information relevant to your agenda. It is integrated with LinkedIn so you can see profiles of people you are scheduled to meet with, and also provides directions to appointments through Google Maps, weather reports, and even tidbits about sunrise and sunset times, and birthdays.

Sunrise launched in November 2012. At the time, 50 percent of early adopters were opening their Sunrise emails everyday which Valade said is high compared to traditional emails. Resolute and NextView Ventures co-led the round, with participation from Lerer Ventures, SV Angel, Adam Rothenberg and David Tisch at BoxGroup, 500 Startups, and Terrapin Bail. Angel investors include Dave Morin of Path, Andrew Kortina of Venmo, Adam Nash and Elliot Shmukler of LinkedIn, Hunter Walk of YouTube, Gustar Alstromer from AirBnB, Adam Mosseri from Facebook and others.

Sunrise is free and available on the App Store. A digital calendar isn’t exactly a new idea and in addition to Google Calendar and iCal, Tempo, Calengoo, Fantastical, GoCal (and more) want to help you organize your schedule. It’s a crowded space and Sunrise hopes to win it with design. The startup is based on New York City.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/06/04/sunrise-raises-2-2m-to-make-waking-up-for-work-suck-less/feed/0750644Sunrise raises $2.2M to make waking up for work suck lessQuixplore launches social calendar to fight fear of missing outhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/31/quixplore-launches-social-calendar-to-fight-fear-of-missing-out/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/31/quixplore-launches-social-calendar-to-fight-fear-of-missing-out/#respondFri, 31 May 2013 22:18:14 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=748676Quixplore is launching its shared social calendar today to improve the process of process of discovering things to do and coordinating and sharing your social life.
]]>If you’re an outgoing person, planning your schedule can feel like a full-time job. Quixplore is launching its shared social calendar today to improve the process of discovering things to do and coordinating and sharing your social life.

Finding cool stuff to do is time-consuming. It involves emailing, texting, checking Facebook, and browsing through various event listings. Quixplore’s goal is to provide a single place to share your plans to an audience of followers.

“People want a place to find out all the best things to do in their city; that’s why event startups are so common,” said founder Matthew Kandler. “The problem, however, is that most events sites focus on large events with big guest lists, which are meant to appeal to a broad audience. This leaves us with no place for the things we are actually doing, such as going for a weekend hike, meeting up with friends for a happy hour, or joining a pickup soccer game.”

Rather than aggregating and curating content from the web, like competitors UpOut, Flavorpill, UpTo, Sosh, and Thrillist, content on Quixplore is crowdsourced. People may go to those other sites for inspiration, but they use other channels to make the actual plans. Quixplore makes it easy to quickly share ideas and activities with friends, and it includes location and time information so you only see events that are relevant to you.

You can sign up through Facebook so all your Facebook friends and events are pulled into Quixplore’s system. You can also add followers and build a social reputation. What you do defines who you are more than a like or tweet, says Kandler, and Quixplore wants to make your social calendar part of your online identity.

Kandler and cofounder Nic Hippenmeyer met while earning Master’s degrees at Stanford’s engineering school. Two years ago, Kandler was visiting Nic in New York City and realized there was no easy way to contact his friends in the city and find out their weekend plans, and as a result, he missed out on some ‘great parties.’

“We realized that there are two huge problems with making plans with friends,” Kandler said. “Most of the things we actually do are only shared on emails or texts, and location is not taken advantage of enough — why wouldn’t you want to tell everyone near you about the cool events you’re attending? The fact of the matter is that there is no one place to see all of the awesome things happening nearby.”

Quixplore takes a Path-like approach to activity discovery. Just as Path is a smaller, more intimate alternative to Facebook, Quixplore takes this idea of a private social network and applies it to your planning social life. The startup is based in Palo Alto and currently bootstrapped.

Photo Credit: Quixplore

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/31/quixplore-launches-social-calendar-to-fight-fear-of-missing-out/feed/0748676Quixplore launches social calendar to fight fear of missing outAtlas debuts appointment sharing app for simpler scheduling on-the-gohttp://venturebeat.com/2013/05/07/atlas-debuts-appointment-sharing-app-for-simpler-scheduling-on-the-go/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/07/atlas-debuts-appointment-sharing-app-for-simpler-scheduling-on-the-go/#respondTue, 07 May 2013 18:28:40 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=732777Atlas launched a mobile scheduling app today that simplifies the process of setting up appointments while away from a computer.
]]>Sometimes the process of scheduling meetings takes up more time than the meetings themselves. Atlas launched a mobile scheduling app today that seeks to streamline this process.

The apps for iPhone cut down on all the back-and-forth communication and toggling between tabs that people often resort to when setting up meetings. The goal is to stay out of your inbox as much as possible while scheduling. Atlas integrates with your existing calendar products and presents you with available meeting times. You can send someone the times that work for you and they click on the time that works best for them. Appointment made.

“Scheduling right now is a two-screen nightmare for people on all sides,” said CEO Hunter Gray in an interview with VentureBeat. “We’ve taken email, the mode of communication, and the calendar, the hub of context, and put them together on one screen. Atlas fits nicely between mobile calendars and web scheduling products. It is appointment sharing, rather than calendar sharing. We think we can own that market.”

Gray graduated from Yale University and entered the realm of direct sales. He lead a force of 10,000 people and observed “massive” inefficiencies in scheduling. Salespeople out in the field were always on their mobile devices, but they waited until arriving back at their desk to figure out appointment times because it was too much of a hassle on mobile. By then, the moment had passed and people were less inclined to follow up. Along with cofounder Michel Bayan, he set out to build a better system.

In addition to appointment sharing, other features include group scheduling, where you invite people to an event and everyone checks yes, no, or maybe to find the optimal time. Users can also make themselves available, prompting others to schedule a meeting with them. Atlas has productivity features as well, like assigning tasks and notifications when others complete them.

There is a lot of activity in the mobile productivity space. Sunrise, Fantastical, Tempo, not to mention the mobile presence of companies like Asana and web schedulers like Tungle.me. Despite the competition, the founders are confident that their product addresses many of the pain points that these other applications don’t and that the technology provides a superior, cross-platform method for scheduling. Atlas isn’t trying to change the behavior of people who typically make appointments while sitting at a computer. It is for people who schedule on-the-go and want a more efficient way to do it. The app will operate on a freemium model, with a monthly subscription fee for a pro account with added features.

Atlas participated in Launchpad LA and has raised $700K from angel investors.

Photo Credit: Atlas

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/05/07/atlas-debuts-appointment-sharing-app-for-simpler-scheduling-on-the-go/feed/0732777Atlas debuts appointment sharing app for simpler scheduling on-the-goUpTo wants to be the social glue of tomorrow, adds $1.5M, and opens its event stream platformhttp://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/upto-wants-to-be-the-social-glue-of-tomorrow/
http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/upto-wants-to-be-the-social-glue-of-tomorrow/#respondThu, 28 Feb 2013 16:18:37 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=630611500,000 shared events and 2000 organizational event streams later, UpTo is pivoting to become the social glue of what's next on an even bigger scale.
]]>Last year UpTo launched as a way of sharing upcoming events with friends, family, and colleagues: the social network of tomorrow. Now, 500,000 shared events and 2,000 organizational event streams later, UpTo is pivoting to become the social glue of what’s next on an even bigger scale.

And adding a handy second-round funding of $1.5 million from initial backers Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

“We always knew we wanted to do this,” CEO Greg Schwartz told me yesterday. “But we didn’t realize how important it would be. … It’s a pivot in terms of energy.”

The company’s mobile app integrates with the calendar app on your smartphone, focusing not just on your own events but on the future events that friends, family, and colleagues consider important. You can also share events out to your UpTo connections — Schwartz described it as the Instagram of calendars last time I talked to him: a layer on top of your calendar, just as Instagram is a layer on top of your camera.

People used it, Apple featured the app in the App Store, and downloads grew, but access to public streams grew even faster. Last year UpTo tentatively opened up the platform to public streams, and pro sports teams, organizational calendars, speaking tours, and organizations jumped on the new capability, to the point where there are now more than 2000 streams of events on the UpTo system .

The problem with that growth? Most of them have been placed there by the company itself.

So now Schwartz is opening up the platform, allowing any business, school, club, or organization to create their own event streams. Interested users can subscribe to those streams, and organizations can also embed live UpTo calendar streams on their websites, for an experience Schwartz says is much more dynamic and social than the standard static event pages.

It’s good timing, as user growth is coming faster than ever: UpTo has had more downloads in the last 45 days than in the previous year. And it’s also a smart one-step-removed user acquisition strategy.

“It’s a B-to-B-to-C user acquisition strategy,” Schwartz explains.

Once organizations join, their members and fans join, meaning that one “sale” (the app and the event stream are currently free) generates hundreds or even thousands of installs.

This is a much bigger vision, and a much bigger product than UpTo had envisioned before. It’s essentially the social network of tomorrow: What’s happening, who’s attending, which friends will be there, and which ones do I want to attend? And it will bring some new competition, too, as UpTo enters space occupied by companies like Eventful and Meetup.

For Schwartz, Upto doesn’t always need to be in the forefront.

“It’s not all about downloading the app or using the app,” he says. “You might experience UpTo and maybe not even realize it. It’s a more distributed approach.”

Schwartz wants to work with companies like Eventful and Meetup, and it is actively pursuing Facebook as well to bring in Facebook events natively and share events from UpTo not as status updates but as Facebook events. The goal is a future in which when users like the Detroit Lions or New York Yankees, for instance, UpTo and Facebook can then recommend other event streams they might be interested in.

The pivot, such as it is, was mostly due to good fortune, Schwartz suggests:

“We sort of got lucky that we were able to experiment, bring a few streams into the app,” he says. “Then we gave people the ability to suggest streams … and huge traffic resulted.”

That sort of luck is how startups stop being startups and start being contenders, and the new round of funding from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures, both based in Detroit, will help.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2013/02/28/upto-wants-to-be-the-social-glue-of-tomorrow/feed/0630611UpTo wants to be the social glue of tomorrow, adds $1.5M, and opens its event stream platformThe best part of waking up is Sunrise in your inboxhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/11/27/the-best-part-of-waking-up-is-sunrise-in-your-inbox/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/27/the-best-part-of-waking-up-is-sunrise-in-your-inbox/#respondTue, 27 Nov 2012 17:10:01 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=580378Two ex-Foursquare designers launch Sunrise, a "smart"and "beautiful" email digest of your day.
]]>I wake up every morning to a cup of coffee and my calendar. With a constant parade of interviews and calls, deadlines, conferences, events, and meetings, my schedule is jam-packed. Today two ex-Foursquare designers are launching a brand new company to simplify the scheduling part of people’s lives.

The product is called Sunrise. It is a “smart” and “beautiful” email digest of your day. Founders Jeremy Le Van and Pierre Valade were high up designers at Foursquare. Disappointed by the available calendar options, they decided to create an alternative that puts user experience at the forefront.

The platform connects APIs from anywhere people might have a calendar, including Facebook, Google Calendar, LinkedIn, and Eventbrite. It merges all of the information in an attractive email that arrives in your inbox every morning. It is optimized for mobile, since around 50% of users open the digest from their smartphones, and it includes integration with LinkedIn that pulls in profiles of people you’re scheduled to meet.

Sunrise also offers relevant information about the weather, birthdays, and addresses, so everything you need to go about your day is consolidated in one place.

“Calendars is one space that hasn’t really evolved in the past years, and it’s time to connect all the information together in a smart way,” said Valade. “When users wake up, it’s already their routine to check their emails, so we are in the natural flow they’re used to. It is both simple and powerful. We designed at least 25 different variations before finding the right one that will work both on mobile and desktop. I think we’ve designed the best email ever.”

Valade and Le Van left Foursquare earlier this year for this project and are still in the early stages. The team is just two people, and they have not yet set out to fundraise. Of their early adopters, 50% open their Sunrise every day, which Valade said is high compared to traditional emails. This design-focused duo is committed to constant iteration, to make Sunrise as user-friendly as possible, and to “solve calendars.”

Sunrise is based in New York.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/27/the-best-part-of-waking-up-is-sunrise-in-your-inbox/feed/0580378The best part of waking up is Sunrise in your inboxUpTo helps you share tomorrow so you can do more todayhttp://venturebeat.com/2012/09/13/upto-share-future-events/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/13/upto-share-future-events/#respondThu, 13 Sep 2012 22:24:41 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=530972If Facebook is about what you did yesterday and Twitter is about what you're doing right now, UpTo is about what you're planning to do tomorrow -- and sharing with those you actually know.
]]>DETROIT — If Facebook is about what you did yesterday, and Twitter is about what you’re doing right now, UpTo is about what you’re planning to do tomorrow — and sharing with those you actually know.

UpTo is a social network based on your calendar. Alternatively, it’s a social replacement for your calendar. Or it’s just a way of seeing what is happening in your neighborhood and for those you care about, in the near future.

Or possibly, all four — in the form of an iPhone app.

I had a chance to sit down with UpTo’s chief executive, Greg Schwartz, on my current tour of Detroit-based startups. He gave me a tour of the updated app — and some insider info on what’s coming soon.

“The calendar has not evolved,” he said, for decades. “It’s still the same singular view of your own life.”

And while Twitter and Facebook are great for sharing, by the time you share and others read … they have missed out on the event. Or you have missed out on a great event that, if only you had known, you would have liked to attend. So while Facebook owns the social graph and Twitter the interest graph, UpTo is focusing on the intent graph: what you will be doing in the future.

The app proved its worth when Schwartz connected with one of the investors in UpTo on the app and saw that he was meeting Jason Calacanis. Schwartz immediately asked him to rep UpTo to Calacanis, and within a few weeks he found himself onstage at LAUNCH conference.

The timing of my visit to Detroit was unexpectedly excellent, as UpTo just released a new version into the app store yesterday, which the official @AppStore account tweeted out last night and Apple promoted as a featured app in the app store today.

That’s as good as it gets for a mobile startup, and the team was celebrating with high fives, hugs, and a special cake with a message I promised not to reveal (although I will say: One word rhymed with “witches”).

I asked Schwartz to walk me through the app:

“It’s very similar to Instagram being a layer on top of your existing camera,” Schwartz said. “UpTo doesn’t replace your calendar … it adds to it.”

It seamlessly integrates with the native calendar on your iPhone. Any events you add on the standard Calendar app are automatically synced to UpTo (and are set as private by default). And any events you add on UpTo are synced to the native iPhone calendar.

When you’re using the app with friends, family, and coworkers, the result is amazing insight into what’s happening in the next days and weeks for those you care about. It’s simple just to browse what’s upcoming. And it may be even more powerful to view groups and individuals to see both what they’re doing — and how busy they are, or when they’re available.

“We spent about a year really trying to figure out the calendar piece,” Schwartz says, and the effort shows. “There are a lot of calendaring apps out there, and there’s a lot of challenges in making a great one.”

The app is a free download. UpTo is focusing on user acquisition right now, adding 55,000 in the last three months (that number will rise dramatically as a featured app.) Eventually, with scale, Shwartz sees monetization opportunities in intent-based advertising, affiliate revenue from ticket purchases, and such, and a software-as-a-service models with organizations.

And the news?

The new version of UpTo now supports calendar streams from sports teams or other organizations you care about, events in your industry, and more. It’s part of the onboarding experience — UpTo wants to make sure that new users have more than just their own personal events in their calendars — and it’s an acknowledgement that your important events aren’t just to-do’s or meetings.

In addition, UpTo just completed a $500,000 seed round with participation from existing investors Detroit Venture Partners and Ludlow Ventures.

And, probably the biggest news is that UpTo is launching a fully native Android app next month with deep calendar integration.

Next on the agenda for Schwartz, in true founder fashion, is a Series A funding round. But if the team’s execution continues at this pace, and the Android launch is as successful as the iOS version is becoming, that doesn’t look like it will be a problem.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/09/13/upto-share-future-events/feed/0530972UpTo helps you share tomorrow so you can do more todayThe 25 most popular online tools for freelancers (infographic)http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/15/the-25-most-popular-online-tools-for-freelancers-infographic/
http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/15/the-25-most-popular-online-tools-for-freelancers-infographic/#commentsThu, 16 Aug 2012 00:11:25 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=510844BestVendor is releasing the result of its 2012 Freelancer Survey tomorrow, revealing the most popular tools and apps for freelancers and entrepreneurs.
But the company gave VentureBeat a sneak peek today.
]]>BestVendor is releasing the result of its 2012 Freelancer Survey tomorrow, revealing the most popular tools and apps for freelancers and entrepreneurs.

But the company gave VentureBeat a sneak peek today.

The single most popular tool? Überpopular file-sharing, storage, and back-up service DropBox. Evernote, the electronic memory app, comes in at No. 4.

The number of times Google shows up on the list is simply shocking, although I supposed it shouldn’t be. Google make no less than seven appearances in to the top 25, including Gmail, Google Docs, Google Voice, Google Calendar, Google Alerts, Google AdWords, and Google Analytics.

(Add Google Search to the list of freelancer tools and I’m guessing seven would magically transform to eight.)

One fly in this survey’s ointment? The company only surveyed about 100 entrepreneurs. If I remember anything at all from my university statistics course, that might give it a reliability factor of don’t-have-a-freaking-clue.

In any case, here’s the infographic.

Little contest: as you check it out … count how many services you use or have used, and put your number in the comments. Will your score beat mine? My number is 17.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2012/08/15/the-25-most-popular-online-tools-for-freelancers-infographic/feed/1510844The 25 most popular online tools for freelancers (infographic)Demo: 1calendar unifies your Outlook and school calendarhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-1calendar-unifies-your-outlook-and-school-calendar/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-1calendar-unifies-your-outlook-and-school-calendar/#respondTue, 13 Sep 2011 16:05:06 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=3293701calendar says that all you need is one calendar, not multiple ones, to keep track of your busy schedule. That makes sense, but it’s not always easy to accomplish. 1calendar is unveiling its solution, Celcat 1calendar Exchange, at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference today. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company is targeting its software at schools and […]
]]>1calendar says that all you need is one calendar, not multiple ones, to keep track of your busy schedule. That makes sense, but it’s not always easy to accomplish.

1calendar is unveiling its solution, Celcat 1calendar Exchange, at the DEMO Fall 2011 conference today. The Copenhagen, Denmark-based company is targeting its software at schools and universities. After all, nobody wants to miss classes, show up late for events, or forget an important milestone for a child.

1calendar’s software is sold as an add-on to its partner Celcat’s scheduling services. With school calendars, the Celcat 1calendar can seamlessly integrate your Microsoft Outlook or Google Calendar with the school calendar, which typically is based on Microsoft’s Exchange software. Usually, parents have to manually type calendar events into their Outlook calendars, a tedious process that is error prone. 1calendar automatically imports the school calendar into your own and notifies you when changes occur.

The service authenticates a student’s identity, locates the appropriate school schedule, and creates a web-based calendar with synchronized, real-time updates for mobile apps. It also supports private events and e-learning platforms.

Daniel Daugaard, chief executive, said in an interview that the company’s goal is to aggregate a variety of data sources to make a student’s life less complicated.

“This is what we call Calendar 2.0,” he said.

While schools are often on tight budgets, Daugaard said the system can wind up making schools money. 1calendar does the integration with schools and handles all the hosting and maintenance required for its institutional clients. If a school wants to make money on the app, it can do so with 1calendar’s in-app ad system. 1calendar gets a share of the proceeds.

1calendar is fully customizable; you can add a school’s logo and colors to the web and mobile apps.

It scales to thousands of users and requires no maintenance. You can access your calendar on your iPhone, Blackberry and Android phones as well. 1calendar automatically connects with Facebook, allowing you to keep track of all of your friends’ invitations, events and birthdays. And it may integrate with Twitter in the future.

One convenient aspect is that a student can choose to get particular schedules, such as the field hockey team’s schedule. If a schedule is variable, then the 1calendar service is very valuable because it is harder to keep track of a complex schedule on paper. One of the future features will be to share calendars with groups of friends, Daugaard said.

1calendar has raised $825,000 to date from Seed Capital and Frey Software. It has six employees and was founded by Daugaard and Jakub Roztocil in 2010. Competitors include oMbiel, Eveoh, Blackboard Mobile, Google Apps EDU (indirect competition), Microsoft Live@EDU, and EMS Master Calendar. 1calendar says it has an edge because it has partnered with all of the major scheduling providers in the world. And it has partnered with England’s Celcat to bring 1calendar to 400 different college and university clients.

1calendar says its testing in Denmark has been very successful. After debuting at DEMO, the company plans to launch premium services in 2012. In the meantime, 1calendar can collect about 20 cents per student per year when the schools adopt it software. 1calendar has about a half dozen employees, not counting contractors, and it is raising a round of money.

Since Celcat is based in the United Kingdom and has a lot of customers in Australia, those are the areas where 1calendar will focus its marketing efforts at the outset. Full told, more than six million students attend the schools where Celcat handles scheduling. Daugaard said he will visit 70 schools in the coming weeks in an effort to sign up as many as possible. He thinks the company could close the year with 30 to 40 schools under contract.

1calendar is one of 80 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Fall 2011 event taking place this week in Silicon Valley. After our selection, the companies pay a fee to present. Our coverage of them remains objective.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/09/13/demo-1calendar-unifies-your-outlook-and-school-calendar/feed/0329370Demo: 1calendar unifies your Outlook and school calendarBox.net CEO: Apple's cloud strategy is like Microsoft's, and it won't workhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/06/22/levie-icloud-microsoft-comments/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/22/levie-icloud-microsoft-comments/#respondWed, 22 Jun 2011 16:00:57 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=301698There’s not much future in online office-suite apps, like the ones Microsoft and Apple offer, if you believe Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie. Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that […]
]]>There’s not much future in online office-suite apps, like the ones Microsoft and Apple offer, if you believe Box.net chief executive Aaron Levie.

Rather than getting all their office apps from one vendor, he said, the best strategy in the enterprise space — and now the consumer space — is to find a service that wraps together the best apps from multiple companies that all do one thing very well.

Box.net (which specializes in enterprise cloud storage) is moving in that direction by adding the ability to access and use files from other companies like customer relationship management software provider Salesforce.com and Google Docs, an online document editor. That’s also a strategy that companies like Microsoft and Apple seem to be avoiding, Levie said.

“With iCloud, Apple’s … seeing the cloud as a way to connect their devices together and their software,” Levie said. “We think it’s moving in the direction of openness, by combining the tools together and making it work seamlessly.”

iCloud is Apple’s next iteration of MobileMe, which will include access to online mail, contacts, and calendar applications. When a user makes a new contact or calendar entry on his or her iOS device, the entry is automatically put in the cloud and then pushed to all other iOS devices. If you ever change that information, it is automatically updated on all devices. Apple chief executive Steve Jobs also talked about three other new iCloud apps — Documents, Photo Stream, and iTunes in the Cloud — when he unveiled the service in June.

Levie said that Microsoft was attempting to do the same thing with Office 365, the company’s online version of its flagship Office software. It’s a cloud-based version of Office and gives customers access to document editing, email, customer relationship management (CRM) and enterprise resource planning (ERP) software under a single blanket.

Box.net’s strategy is to do one thing — cloud storage — and be very good at it. And if Levie’s prediction of where the market’s heading plays out, the company could see a big payoff. The startup seems to have investors convinced that it’s on the right road — it just managed to raise a $48 million round of funding that it will use to double its engineering and sales staffs. On the other hand, it’s difficult to discount Microsoft and Apple’s strategies — with market caps of $209 billion and $300 billion respectively, they certainly have a lot of weight behind them.

But Box.net does currently has 6 million users. Some 60,000 businesses employ its cloud-storage software, including 73 percent of Fortune 500 companies. That figure is up from around 66 percent in February. The company is also no stranger to mobile — as of January, its iPhone application recorded more than 250,000 downloads and its Android application had been downloaded more than 70,000 times.

“We can only build so much and of our limited time we want to be the best place to store and manage your data,” Levie said. “The competition thinks very differently.”

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/22/levie-icloud-microsoft-comments/feed/0301698Box.net CEO: Apple's cloud strategy is like Microsoft's, and it won't workGoogle makes scheduling appointments easier in Calendarhttp://venturebeat.com/2011/06/06/google-calendar-appointments/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/06/google-calendar-appointments/#respondTue, 07 Jun 2011 02:39:21 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=264382Google is adding the ability to manage appointments to its Google Calendar web app. Users will be able to select a section of the day they would like to block off for appointments, which can be split into any type of time block (e.g. 30 minute slots). Each Google account will also have its own […]
]]>Google is adding the ability to manage appointments to its Google Calendar web app.

Users will be able to select a section of the day they would like to block off for appointments, which can be split into any type of time block (e.g. 30 minute slots). Each Google account will also have its own appointments sign-up page that users will access to book appointments. That page can also be embedded into personal websites.

Google uses the example of college professors booking appointments with students and hair dressers as some of the obvious candidates for the service.

The new feature will begin rolling out today, according to the official Gmail blog. The blog post didn’t indicated if people booking appointments need a Google account or whether the new feature would roll out for Google’s enterprise app accounts.

I was hoping to get the feature before this post went up so I could offer some initial feedback but I’m still waiting for Google to enable my account. For now, check out the initial screen shots from Google’s blog post.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/06/06/google-calendar-appointments/feed/0297329Google makes scheduling appointments easier in CalendarRIM acquires calendar scheduling app Tungle.mehttp://venturebeat.com/2011/04/27/rim-acquires-calendar-scheduling-app-tungle-me/
http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/27/rim-acquires-calendar-scheduling-app-tungle-me/#respondWed, 27 Apr 2011 23:55:20 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=256742BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced this morning that it has acquired Tungle.me, a calendar scheduling application, for an undisclosed sum of money. Tungle.me, which launched at DEMO in 2007, offers a service to synchronize and schedule meetings across various calendaring applications — including Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Additionally, it helps prevent […]
]]>BlackBerry maker Research In Motion (RIM) announced this morning that it has acquired Tungle.me, a calendar scheduling application, for an undisclosed sum of money.

Tungle.me, which launched at DEMO in 2007, offers a service to synchronize and schedule meetings across various calendaring applications — including Microsoft’s Outlook, Google Calendar, and Apple iCal. Additionally, it helps prevent timezone and double-booking conflicts, and integrates with devices such as Apple’s iPhone and RIM’s own BlackBerry.

The service has managed to build a fair amount of traction since launching, currently put into use by 40 percent of Fortune 1000 companies and over 800 universities around the world.

While RIM has yet to mention what it plans to do with the service, the company is most likely going to keep it running in its current form, going by its similar past acquisitions of Gist, an e-mail contact manager, and DataViz, a document platform for Outllook.

The Montreal, Canada-based startup was founded by Marc Gingras. It raised $6.36 million over two funding rounds, with investors that included Desjardins Venture Capital, Commonwealth Capital Ventures, and JLA Ventures.

]]>http://venturebeat.com/2011/04/27/rim-acquires-calendar-scheduling-app-tungle-me/feed/0256742RIM acquires calendar scheduling app Tungle.meDEMO: CalendarFly targets schools with social calendarhttp://venturebeat.com/2010/03/23/calendarfly/
http://venturebeat.com/2010/03/23/calendarfly/#respondTue, 23 Mar 2010 12:00:29 +0000http://venturebeat.com/?p=168851CalendarFly is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective. Managing a busy schedule can be a difficult talk. Now a startup called CalendarFly is looking to provide a helping […]
]]>CalendarFly is one of 65 companies chosen by VentureBeat to launch at the DEMO Spring 2010 event taking place this week. These companies do pay a fee to present, but our coverage of them remains objective.

Managing a busy schedule can be a difficult talk. Now a startup called CalendarFly is looking to provide a helping hand with its free calendar solution uniquely targeted at parents, teachers, coaches and organizational leaders.

At DEMO, CalendarFly will show how its social calendar allows users to easily update their schedules and share it with chosen groups. The main user interface is set up as around a central calendar where users can create tasks for various days. Groups can also be created so that the user can pick and choose who gets to see specific tasks. The system also has a labeling tool which helps in identifying tasks, such as event, test, practice, or holiday.

Imagine you’re a teacher and your students have an exam on Friday, for example, with CalendarFly you can aggregate all the parents that use CalendarFly into one group. Then, once an task is officially entered, they will automatically see it on their own schedules. No phone calls, emails or written notes to try to get a hold of parents.

The service competes with well established calendar solutions, like Google, but also has competitors targeting parents and schools with online calendars, including Cozi and MyFamily.com.

The Pelham, New York-based company has raised an initial angel round of funding of $75,000 thus far with an additional $100,000 waiting in escrow.